Monday, May 31, 2004

meri channi channa channo channa channa haii ....oooooooh
meri channi meri channi channa channa bollywood

Damn its still stuck in my head. And i'm STILL in that mood where i feel like flaying alive anyone who pisses me off with a blunt, rusty razorblade while drowning that person in vat of snake venom AND feeding him Dr. Bombay's crap-ass songs on headphones full blast( on a blue ipod mini, perhaps?). Grrr. Roaarrr. Hisss....ANybody in the hall needs somebody 'taken care of'?

Seriously dunno what's really getting to me....

Sunday, May 30, 2004

Leeeet's start today's post with a little gem i found while faffing around :

Two men have been sitting out on a lake all day long, ice fishing. One has been having no luck at all and the other has been pulling fish after fish out of his hole in the ice. The man having no luck finally leans over and asks the other what his secret is.
"mmmmm mmm mm mmm mmmm mmm mmm."
"I'm sorry, what did you say?"
"mmmmm mmm mm mmm mmmm mmm mmm."
"I'm sorry, I still didn't understand you." The successful man spits something into his hand.
"You've got to keep your worms warm."


Booyahh - i wish i can be there to see that smirk/wince or even hear the 'ewwww' comin from ya!

Anyways, I've been in a rather evil-ish mood for the last coupla days. Probably its a smidge of stress from having to do really well on the next lab exam or finishing the coursework on time - oRrr it could just be from having to put up with a heap of random crap from random people. Personally i think its either the full moon or just something hormonal ( which is strange, as finally returning to regular gym sessions should result in a more chilled, mellow me). Spent the better part of the day tongue-lashing people and ploughing through anyone who got in my way on a grocery run to chinatown. You'd think i learnt before not to go on a saturday - sheesh. Had i been either an agoraphobic or claustraphobic i would have died like, a thousand times over today. Screw it if it sounds gay - i feel like a class A primo bitch todaaaayy!!

Later Sunday night i made Pho again ( vietnamese kueyteow soup, pronounced 'fur'). Jadi jugak laa....as Lionel suddenly got 'reminded' that he had bar duty we just brought our food down and ate at the bar. As luck would have it the other local girl doing bar duty lived in Thailand for a coupla of years and sOMeBody let it slip that i'm half thai so i got stuck making small talk with her while the other guys slooowwly drifted away - damn you all!! Haha don't get me wrong its not like she's a nauseatingly hideous wench or anything but i was just noooot in a very layan-ing mood today ( refer to previous paragraph).

Saw Troy Friday night. Well shot, amazing action sequences and all but the story was kinda mangled. Adding the odd love interest or two is fine ( it IS Hollywood) but killing people who aren't supposed to die and vice versa while getting all the other nonimportant fine details correct is just...well...Hollywood. I wouldn't presume to bore anyone with the list of inconsistencies though. But still - coooool fighting.

Friday, May 28, 2004

Sorry about slagging off (the posts) for the last coupla days. Again, i wasn't exactly busy, but god knows my time just keeps on dissapearing despite having done sooo little work.Only things i got left are two labs, a Prolog lab exam and that Bioinformatics group coursework. Graargh...

Saw Bombay Dreams on Tuesday night - schweeet. Very flashy, loud and impressive. Although the lyrics were a bit on the lame side, the music was really catchy and the dancing was...urm..powerful? You could see quiite a few people dancing in their seats (ehEM eHEM). Their portrayal of the many Bollywood stereotypes were amusingly spot on - although they missed a few bits like running around trees and the excessive fighting sound effects. Until this very moment i've been playing the soundtrack cd to the point of having the tunes stuck in my head. Oh well..chai chaiyya chiayya hei!

The rest of the week? NOthin much - no more lectures, so i've just been milling away doing 'research' for the coursework and trying to start on the labs. Managed to catch up on looads of sleep, and started going to the gym again - so bitter the pain, so sweet the endorphines! Really gotta try to swing back into full momentum for work - Topics coursework deadline's on the 4th, and the final lab exam's on the 8th then god knows what i'm gonna do until the 25th...if i manage to settle everything early i'll see if i can go back like...a week early or something...

Till then, i'll try and think up of some funny/random things to put up to spare you guys from reading more of my oh-so-intTUHresting day to day goings on....

cali chaiyya chaiyya chaiyya chaiyya ,
cali chaiyya chaiyya chaiyya chaiyya !


Damn that shit is stuck good in my head....

Monday, May 24, 2004

Still struggling to get back in the mood to work. A tiring but 'adventure' packed weekend didn't help either. Had loadsa fun though. Had a quick weekend trip to Brownsea Island( a really small - 1.5 miles across - island which is a nature reserve and the birthplace of the Scouts) , Bath and Stonehenge. We rented a 7-seater and somehow crammed 8 people in all the way. Jed was the driver, and the others were Lu, Lionel, Alex, Jac, Vivian, Jingye and of course me.

Day 1 - Started on the drive outta town around 7.30 am-ish. After about almost 3 hours, we got to Poole which was another typical touristy English harbour town. Wandered around for a while then got on the ferry to Brownsea Island. On arrival you can already tell that the brits spend quite a bit of money looking after their heritage/history sites. Lots of information about the island's history and wildlife all over the island itself - it had a few private owners, hosted a pottery works which went bust soon after( hence all the pottery crap all over the beaches) and was the birthplace of the Scouts movement, by the handiwork of Lord Baden Powell himself. Everything is very well placed and mapped on the island. Had no problems finding any of the sites. Luckily we had nice weather too. Lotsa mildly exotic birds, peacocks etc but didn't see any of the red squirrels which were supposedly the mainstay of the island. Oh well.

After about 5 hours plus communing with nature( or at least doing our darndest). We took the ferry back and drove on to Bath. Just as our luck would have it, there was a music festival in town, and we had a freakin problem finding accomodation. In the end, we managed to get one double room - we managed to cram 5 people in there, and the rest of us ( yours truly included) slept in the car.

Day 2 - Amazingly the three of us in the car got slightly more sleep than the others. Everyone got up around 9-ish and after b'fast we checked out the Roman baths in town. A few of us felt a con-job coming and decided against coughing up 8 pounds for the tour around the old baths so we checked out the rest of the town while they were at the baths. Met up later and went to chill in the city gardens for a while.

Next, we drove over to Stonehenge. Very touristy place. Mildly interesting but somewhat unimpressive. If it werent for the audioguides i personally wouldn't have stayed for very long. At least i can say i've actually been there though...Stayed for around an hour, then drove back to London- made it back around 7 sharp.

Now its just me - After a much needed shower, rushed over to make the 7pm dinner at the opening of the new Malaysia Hall. Due to various things , among them the Circle line being closed and the District line being screwed over too due to track changes i only got there at almost 9. Food was completely gone, but at least managed to see some people. Hung out there for a while, then had a takeaway from Nahar and took a bus home...tiiiiired.

Oh yeah - put some photos up from the trip. Don't think i'll put anything up from Bath though. The baths weren't exactly pretty. Maybe once we pool our digicam photos i'll see if the other guys got any good ones..

Thursday, May 20, 2004

GOd i almost forgot how boring Computing lectures were. We are on our last week of lectures on Prolog, and the lecturer is like....the second most boring one on the course ever. Even people in the freakin front row cannot help falling asleep. What is it about Computing lecturers - they're generally as boring as hell and aren't very good at explaining something despite knowing it inside out.

The fencing demo/showcase on monday went alright. They also broadcast the debate whether or not to host the Olympics in London to the rest of the hall. It was a strange sordid debate - one of the Brit speakers just rambled on and on about role models in sports, and the French speaker spent a good deal of his airtime insulting both the french and the english.

Been wasting a lot of time these last coupla days just lazing about with da crew talking cock, playing foosball/frisbee and talking more cock. Still feeling very sleepy despite managing to catch up on loads of sleep. Probably milling about wasting time is more tiring than i thought. Oh yeah - remembered how freakin hilarious The Emperor's New Groove was at another movie session in my room yesterday.

Sleepy. Need to get more catnaps before i start rambling like a hippie on an acid trip. DuuuuuUUUdeee....

Monday, May 17, 2004

Sweet, sweet freedom!! Finals are over.Yay.woo-hoo...yeahhhfghlabaschmoobyblptffff...

Now that the ball's no longer in my court...still cannot help but worry - constantly making contingency plans in my head assuming i screwed up in my finals. Resits are probably a forgone conclusion - I just hope i can do them at the British Council back home instead of cutting my summer short...Now i'm just waddling about in the shallow pit left behind after going cold turkey from weeks of workin like a dawg ( well...like Amar if he was a dawg anyway)...

So...exams are over - you'd assume i'd be hangin' loose, partyin down, shakin that thang etc.?

Problem # 1 : Term doesn't end till the 25th of June. We've still got a massive group coursework goin - research a given topic and put up a thorough, comprehensive website about it. AAND we're gonna learn another screwed up programming language - Prolog and we'll have an exam on that too. At least workload's gonna be sliightly lighter.

Problem # 2 : For almost everybody else ( bar other computing students) their exams are barely just starting . Sometimes i wonder which is worse - being the only one freakin out about exams or being the only one ambling around goyang telok(shaking balls - doing pretty much nothing )

Well i guess i kinda earned a weekend of extra sleep seeing how many hours of sleep i missed over the last couple of weeks. By friday i was really really running on adrenaline and coffee. Daamn...instead of sleeping the rest of the day and rising later to paaartayyy....i had to go for a fencing training session for monday's demo, then i had to rush back for a quick lunch and then make a 3.45 haircut appointment( Vidal Sassoon - got GQ discount lorrr) . Later on in the evening caught the SingSoc comittee at their leavers' BBQ and their dance rendition of "Superstar" ( no comments). Capped off the night with a supper at Al-Dar( ohhh-kay thats enough lamb for a while) with the guys. Went to sleep thoroughly drained.

To make up for not cooking for the last coupla weeks i cooked on both saturday and sunday. Made chicken tandoori bhuna on sat and tagliatelli carbonara Sunday. Nobody died, but i lost quiite a bit of blood from my left index finger on my cursed Zwilling Professional S ( i should really give that knife a name - something like BloodBlade or SkinCutter )while deboning the chicken. Safe to say that my typing ( and foosball, maybe?) is pretty much impaired.

Finally got around to watching Girl Next Door( found a really bad cinema bootleg on the college network) on saturday night with the regular crew. Typical american teen flick, albeit with a few interesting plot twists and the deliciously delectable Elisha Cuthbert providing the eye candy. Who ever woulda thought that gawky but cute-ish host of PMK( Popular Mechanics for Kids or some shit like that on Discovery) a coupla years back would be an all American, smoulderingly sexy hottie. She kinda got noticed when she reappeared in the last 2 seasons of 24. Anyway, can't wait for the barrage of the leave-your-brains-at-home summer movies coming our way...

Oh yeah - the best of luck to you guys with exams still coming. Enjoyy!

Thursday, May 13, 2004

Alriighty i'm almost back to normal - no more mental mood swings. No more random ramblings( apologies for the baaad poetry ) - just 100% Amar goodness. Could be that my last paper is tomorrow. Oh-kayy its fuckin Reasoning ( nastiest bits of logic, math and programming) but still..its like you're at the phase where you just can't panic or worry anymore - hence me blogging right now!!

Summer's almost here in earnest - its like 9.30 pm and the sun still has yet to properly set - and it'll be back up around 4.30 am to boot...people are having little picnics all over Princes Gardens - I can bloody well smell it- and i'm on the 7th floor facing the OTHER side!! Cue summer clothes too....them twins be goin out for walks and shit - foshiiiziee! ( don't get it? too baaad) Too bad i'll probably end up celebrating my end of exams and the glorious weather alone...or with the odd random computing student. I might be done but everyone else is just mostly starting.

Had a really weird ass dream yesterday - something about a bus arriving at a tube station instead of a train, a whole buncha cempakans were there ( get this - mr. Kuah was the driver!) and everyone was eating cekodok pisang. I kinda forgot the rest. I really gotta get my Dreamcatcher fixed - if only i can find a shaman or medicine man somewhere in london.

Gonna have a crazy ass Friday - Firstly i'd probably be running on very little sleep once the true last minute panic kicks in for Reasoning. Then i gotta dash over for my first fencing training session since the end of last term to rehearse some flashy moves for a demo we're having at the opening of the Tanaka Business Centre - theyre gonna have some debate about the Olympics there and have demos of random sports. THEN i got more errands to run that afternoon,probably before dropping by at the Singaporean's Leavers' picnic and gettin some free nibbles..ho ho ho... god knows what else is gonna go down tonight, but i doubt theres gonna be much with more exams for other people coming up next week...

Crap better get back to hopelessly sifting through reasoning notes. Really really REALLY can't wait to get back - still like... a month and a half to go. Gotta settle housing for next term, storage for all my crap...

great. now i have a wicked craving for cekodok pisang.Dammit

Monday, May 10, 2004

I apologize in advance - today's entry is gonna be mostly melodramatic ramblings from a very, very frazzled noggin. The accumulation of exam stress coupled with various other annoyances and irritations is reALLY getting to me. Since i've been missing my normal physical de-stressing methods( get your mind out of the gutter, fools) i've fallen back on something i haven't done for a while - drawing and writing. Yeah...so..wham here's something i just churned out on the spot:

In Darkness Therin

in darkness therin i dwell and toil
seemingly burning the midnight oil,
though in reality my mind lies asunder
spent, broken, trampled under

i delve into my work
hoping to recognize, recall
but nary a snippet familiar
nay nothing, nothing at all

saturated, unable to absorb
studying becomes mere folly
inward gloom,sadness, malice and spite
further my thoughts doth sully

charlatans and hypocrites abound
tongues dripping venom and ichor
slander, plotting and deceit
in all its spiteful splendor

alone i stand, lost and drifting
amongst a crowded, tangled web confused
ceaselessly, carefully sifting
what passes for truth between lies obtuse

in darkness therin i dwell and toil
seemingly burning the midnight oil,
though in reality my mind lies asunder
spent, broken, trampled under

Interpret it what-fucking-ever way you wish. Its not a particular critique of anyone of anything. Just random outpourings from my fucked-up subconscious- maybe a touch of Byron there, a bit of Blake here. Whatever. So what if it doesn't sound very "amar". rrRRgh i'm seriously going mental - don't really know how long i can keep up my cheery, random facade....hopefully i'll be able to pull it through the next 3 papers without having to put on a strait jacket.

Sunday, May 09, 2004

Haha it seems kinda quiet around here lately.... oOOhh now i know why - there's something wrong with the messagebox...muahhahahaha

Database on friday was mercifully rather do-able...all that cramming and going to the library ( if for nothing more than to just borrow a book) probably paid off after all....Tried to catch up on sleep for the rest of the day, but random shit kept on coming up....in the end by midnight i was still very much behind on sleep. The regular room invasions don't help either !! Finally managed to give my pillow some head ( sorry that came outta nowhere - ehyuk ehyuk!) around 4am

Adding to the excitement, charlotte's nubian queen bimbo of an ex-roomate set off the fire alarm for the second time by doing her hair ( only god knows what these african girls do to their hair) at around 11-ish. Needless to say that fucked up my sleep pattern even further. Managed to crawl outta bed around 3, made a ser-weeet lunch and tried to work for a while ( nope, didn't work) Later 6 of us had dinner as planned at Meshwar, and saw Van Helsing at High St. Kent Odeon. Very stylish, pretty visuals, excellent action but a story that made absolutely no sense. Fun to watch though....

Since friday afternoon, everything was kinda blurly passing by. I think all the last minute cramming and sleep depravation finally got to me. I'm either completely concussed and in my own world of 'who gives a damn'-ness or having those weird ass mood swings again. Probably my psychological anti-stress measures are over-compensating or have completely fried....ORr probably i just need to get out and have some proper fun eeeyyy?

Thursday, May 06, 2004

Halfway through my exams....schweEEEt.... just Databases ( tomorrow ) ,plus hardware, discrete math and reasoning( absolute horror) next week. Actually moseyed down to the library and picked up a purty little database book to augment the tinny notes our dBase lecturer gave us. In fact i should be nose deep in it right now. Its really becoming a nasty habit - blogging when i should be goddamned studying.

Had a little fun break after i was done failing my math paper - i was just messing about and catching up on some extra sleep weds nite when Lu and Alex randomly burst in, and before i knew it lionel, fong may and darren were here too and we were watching Ju-On( a lame subtitle-less tv-movie version of it anyway) Typical asian horror - boring ass beginning with the odd bit of stretched suspense and blood curdling images that stick in your head( doesn't work if you cover you eyes though, right Lu? Fong May?). Personally thought it wasn't particularly well written or scary- to this date nothing surpasses watching Ring ( jap version) alone at 3 am in the morning on a howling, windy night in a mostly empty boarding house AND by some freaky coincidence having your phone ring RIGHT after it....The movie was followed by more random faffing about and a singalong to about 3-am ish.

Paid accom. bills and went to the library today. Joined everyone else for frisbee for a while after dinner too. Spent the rest of the day trying to work.....Oh yeah had a japanese tea ceremony ( by tea ceremony i mean making powdered macha green tea and getting scalded by the damn coffee machine when it spluttered hot water on my hand instead of the damned cup). Well back to databases....need some points there to raise my average above passing..:)

Maaan can't wait for holidays to start ....dying to be back home in some nice sun, lepaking at hartamas and eating fuckloads of tasty tasty food.....

Monday, May 03, 2004

"The powers of a man's mind are directly proportional to the quantity of coffee he drinks" : 19th century Brit philospher, Sir James McKintosh

You'd think that with all those study-time espressos, i'd be a freakin Mensa twice over by now......probably shouldn't be complaining though...All that coffee's probably the only thing keeping my mind from goin to absolute mush. Maybe a randomly produced haiku would placate the gods of the Arabica bean:

Fragrant bean blossom
to creamy bitter sweet scent
Drink and study now!


( yes its in 5-7-5 and i didn't forget the season & cutting word)

Y'know what would be really, really useful right now? A conveniently placed life "rewind" button. Wouldn't mind a "Save/Load" menu as well. I'm sure at some point in life - a decision that you regret, something that could have been said better, an irreplaceable loss - whatever the reason might be, you just wish you can backtrack on life. Well right about now, i'm seriously wishing that i was doing another course elsewhere....like Art/Design/anything creative at a nice art college... ( or at the very least Mech Eng, Chem Eng or something more along my line). After 2/8 papers out of my finals.....well....YiKES. Can't even remember why i chose this course in the first place. Kinda regret not following through on the suggestion given ages past by my father to do medicine. Well who knows....maybe some other Amar in some other alternate universe who is doing say....Art at the Royal Academy or Medicine at Edinburgh U is blogging the same thing right now....


Sunday, May 02, 2004

*---ADDENDUM---*
Aaaaallrighty....The sun is fuckin' rising, the birds are fuckin' chirping and NOW i genuinely feel like blogging whats really on my mind...

I have been pretty fucking much on fucking edge recently. Exams are one thing...... British red tape and bureaucracy ( don't ask) ? A fucking pain in the ass..... but what's been really pissing me off recently is having to put up with annoying crap from annoying people, one in particular. Those of you who've known me for, like, a third my life would know that i have a high tolerance for crap and it'll take quite a lot to fucking piss me off.....Well...without going into names and details, lets just say that i'm pretty fucking pissed. Its just those little things that pile up over time and you just hold back from snapping at their fucking faces like a fucking piranha on a heroin bender until they curl up in the foetal position and cry like a baby. Haven't had a de-stressing session for a while either - had nobody to fence with, haven't the time or energy for a gym session and just don't feel like drawing anymore. I'm just fuckin waiting for a fuckin chance to open a deluxe can of whoopass on the next person who really pushes my buttons. eerrrrggGGGHHHHH

PHEW....now i feel sliiightly better.....

Forgot to mention that i just saw Kill Bill 2 the other day. Not as much action as the first, but the storyline was kinda better. Really felt the fury in the Elle/Bride trailer fight ( cool eye pluck) , laughed like a damned fool at the chinese chop-socky genre parody that is Gordon Liu's Pai Mei ( HAH ha ha haaa....[brushes beard] ) and went WTF quite a lot of times at those really random what-the-fuck-was-tarantino-thinking scenes( like the pregnancy test assasin and the classroom part) . SchwEEEt movie overall. Wonder what happened tho to the black guy in the movie-trailer( the first one for both parts ) that was supposed to get an ass-kicking from Bill.

Oh yeah....when Waris finally gives up and admits he's gay and we have no more randomness filling up the chatboard here's something that might interest y'all - got the idea from a friend's blog ( cheers pinky!) Its one of those long winded zodiac descriptions of your character and shit. This site goes quite a bit further and adds a lot of other rubbish too - read what is says for an arian male and let the Amar-bashing comments flow in. Be sure to read what it says about you too - enjoyyy!
Maan this is really getting to be a habit...i definitely meant to post more than one pathetic post a week, but you know...exams and shit ( yesss good excuse examsss). Haven't been in a particularly bore-my-friends-with-what-i-did-today mood either.

We-ell first week of exams are over, only two more to go. Even though it was only like two ( brutal ) papers it still kinda felt like a hectic week. Managed to crap in some proper hardcore last minute studying ( didn't seem to matter much for Programming II though...mamposss) aside the odd coffee session and similar distractions. Feared the absolute worst for Logic but in the end i guess it was... passable la....3 more to go next week : Computer Systems ( architecture, assembly and operating systems) , Maths & Graphics and Databases....need all the luck i'm gonna get.

Broke my damn glasses the other day....after wearing 'em with a nut missing for a week one lens just fell off and cracked. Crap-ass lenses - bah! Had to miss touring one of the houses we considered for accomodations next year to get down to Specsavers at Edgware to get another pair done. Still pricey despite offers and student discount - they had better be freakin invincible.

Oh yeah....the Krups espresso maker i won on eBay came in too...schweeeet - it was in perfect factory condition and worked beautifully. Starbucks can kiss my ass - oh wait...i still get the ground beans from them...crap. Anyway, considering the bargain i got on the coffeemaker it'll probably pay for itself ( in terms of starbucks espressos) in the next two weeks or so....Haha good practice if i ever apply to work as a barista back home at S'bucks 1U...

Finally, i just skimmed through the 1000-ish Easter Trip pictures we kinda cut down from the beginning 1600ish and chose a random ( and presentable - there are some that will NEVER see the web) selection to put up on my photos site. If you want to see more you can either wait for summer, or get your ass over here and post them up yourself...( dahlah malass....sibuk lagi lah braderrrr) Enjoyy!!